(2020-11-02) Guinn A Tale Of Two Cults

Rusty Guinn: A Tale of Two Cults. The cult of Uri Geller should have died on August 1st, 1973.

It was the summer of Watergate. Johnny Carson lamented that the audience was sick of hearing about the scandal

Geller’s excruciating twenty-two minute appearance on Carson that night is among the most awkward ever presented on television

Carson, who was a practiced stage magician (and skeptic) himself, was excited to see these thrilling gifts in action.

Geller expected an interview. As he later attested, a Tonight Show producer provided him with a list of 40 different questions he might be asked. He was instead being asked to give a demonstration of his powers. It was completely unfair and unsporting, which is to say, positively delightful.

for the most part, Uri spends an interminable twenty-two minutes halfheartedly begging to be asked questions instead of being asked to perform

before Geller’s appearance, Johnny Carson had reached out to a frequent guest of the show, a fellow skeptic and even better stage magician by the name of James Randi.

You may know him as the Amazing Randi, who died last week at the age of 92. Randi was a remarkable man. Far more than just an entertainer, he devoted his life to showing the unvarnished reality underlying abstractions and illusions.

His answer was simple: bring your own props, do it in secret, and don’t let Geller’s people near any of them.

In short, Johnny Carson’s call to the Amazing Randi destroyed the cult of Uri Geller. Except that isn’t what happened. At all. The nightmarish Carson appearance was NOT the end of Geller’s career. In a lot of ways, it was the beginning, at least to a sort of stardom in the United States that he had already achieved in Israel. He was booked to another show almost immediately

Richard B. Groves: Reverend Groves was a minister of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Navarro County, Texas throughout the post-bellum 1860s and 1870s.

By contemporary accounts, Rev. Richard Groves, who moved to Texas from the Cumberland River Valley of Kentucky (by way of pre-Chicago frontier Illinois) with his extended family of ministers, was a good and well-respected man.

It happened, however, that Groves and four other Cumberland Presbyterian ministers in Corsicana became convinced that they had discovered something new in the emerging “holiness doctrine,”

They reasoned that the process of sanctification would allow Christians to be immune to even the temptation of sin. They could become, well, literally perfect.

I’m sure you can see where this is going.

So it was that Richard Groves became a millenialist cult leader.

during the winter of 1878 into 1879, each of the Corsicana Enthusiasts, as they came to be known, traveled all through Navarro and Limestone counties preaching the doctrine of absolute perfection and the imminent return of Christ.

Then, in the spring of 1879, Groves came across a pamphlet called Glad Tidings, published by one Henry T. Williams of Brooklyn, New York. It was a fanatical document of similar temperament

Richard Groves’s brother William got it in his head that he would travel to New York to have a missing finger replaced, which was apparently among the services on offer by Mr. Williams. It made for a good opportunity to test his power, as well.

When he returned to Corsicana, he was changed

the center of a new religion.

the Groves brothers along with a small group of other elders directed their flock to collect all of their belongings and worldly wealth, to be contributed to the establishment of a community near Little Rock, Arkansas

The Home was the 19th Century version of the Fyre Festival

*In the end, the organizer runs off with the money. It failed almost immediately. Everything fell apart. Reality set in.

The curtain on the Corsicana Enthusiasts was pulled…and everyone saw it for what it was. And then something funny happened – things went back to normal*

the communities largely accepted the wanderers back

while Richard Groves was leading a millenialist cult, he did so with his daughter in tow. And when Corsicana let him back into the fold, he did so with his daughter in tow.

My great-great grandmother.

But it raises an interesting question: how does it happen that revealing the lies painted over by narratives in one kind of cult only strengthens it, while in another it reveals it and destroys it utterly? It’s complicated.

This is why the everyday cults of our lives, be they investment, political or social, thrive by presenting each issue and each intersection between real world and narrative world as existential. When the stakes attached to a narrative are infinite, it is infinitely difficult to divest ourselves from it.

Beyond the gulf in the scale and scope of the cults I described to you above, this is the difference between them: that the community of Corsicana decided to relax the consequences for those led into error and ruin.

As we continue to write on Epsilon Theory about what we mean by BITFD, many readers have asked whether we should be talking more about how we build the thing back up. Now, truth be told, that is a big part of what we mean by BITFD in the first place

You must be merciful.

Don’t mistake me. You don’t have to forget. You shouldn’t forget. To people who broke laws or behaved corruptly, do justice. To those entrusted with much who failed in their trust, do your diligence. To institutions that failed, do your worst. And let there be no doubt in anyone’s mind that this shall always be the way

But to people who thought Wrong Things, show mercy.

I’ll get a lot of responses – from a lot of different cults who think I’m talking about their particular nemesis, and I assure you, I’m not – saying to screw off, that all These People had it coming and have it coming

BITFU means worrying more about whether our town, state, country, world and markets are healthier, freer, more creative, more beautiful and more prosperous tomorrow than whether everyone agrees that we were right in the past.

truth is only one of the necessary conditions for this kind of change. The other?
Mercy.
It will take both to BITFU. Do we have it in us?